איגרת גנוזה להגנת חסידות ברסלב

Bratslav Hasidism remained a small, persecuted sect during the nineteenth century. The abuses it suffered were foremost internal, at the hands of other hasidic groups. With that, there is hardly a work of anti-hasidic satire that does not cite from Bratslav hasidic literature. Bratslav, it seems, served them as a metonymy for hasidic ignorance. The first to present Bratslav Hasidism in a critical light was the maskilic writer Josef Perl of Tarnopol. Perl not only incorporated hundreds of mocking citations from Bratslav literature into his works, but even went so far as to author a parodical continuation to one of R. Nahman of Bratslav’s Tales. Many followed in his footsteps and Bratslav remained a favorite subject of mockery in maskilic literature, even as the downtrodden group was subjected to continuous attacks from other hasidic sects during the 1860s. Even Eliezer Zvi Zweifel, who is widely seen as the first among the maskilim to approach Hasidism in positive light, ridiculed Bratslav in his work Shalom al Yisrael (1868–1870) and wrote of R. Nahman that the latter “gave rise to countless delusions, explicated on the basis of strange, shocking conjectures,” that his teachings were filled with “stupidity,” and that his Tales were nonsense. R. Natan of Nemirov’s confessional, he wrote, was a “polluted prayer.” A change in attitude towards Bratslav, or to be precise, the unique personalities of R. Nahman and his disciple and scribe, R. Natan, took place only among the final writers of the Haskalah, even as their admiration remained intermixed with criticism. In late 1887, Micha Yosef Berdyczewsky published an essay titled “Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Toward a History of the Great Ones of Israel) ” in the periodical ha-Asif, edited by Nahum Sokolow. This essay, despite the absence of any explicitly anti-hasidic polemics, stirred up the anger of one R. Yitshak Isaac Goldstein of Bucharest, a Bratslav Hasid then residing in the city of Tsfat, who produced a lengthy response elucidating the nature of the occluded tsadik R. Nahman, his teachings, and key ideas. Goldstein wrote his twenty-page response in 1889 and quickly dispatched it to Sokolow to print in ha-Asif (the full text appears below based on three manuscripts). It comes as no surprise that the text was not published, as its contents were of little interest to the readers of ha-Asif. Yet the letter itself is of great importance, as it preserves significant internal Bratslav traditions. Three distinct copies of the letter circulated among various writers and maskilim, who did not hesitate to plagiarize it in their own works. The letter is an exceptional early instance of a “revelation” of internal Bratslav teachings in the late-nineteenth century, shortly before the movement would undergo a renaissance in the early-twentieth century that led to an expansion of its ranks in eastern Europe and its emergence as a more prominent hasidic sect (The research was conducted as part of the project: The Renaissance of Bratslav Hasidism, 1906-1942, ISF, Grant no. 1107/20)